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It’s mid-summer and there’s no end in sight for the travelers heading to Smith Mountain Lake. At the SML Visitor Center located at Bridgewater Plaza, our staff and volunteers have the unique opportunity to speak with everyone who enters our doors. A larger than usual number are first-time visitors and many have expressed their joy in discovering Smith Mountain Lake. In fact, they LOVE this region.

There seems to be an up-tick in the number and severity of incidents around the lake over the past several weeks.
Smith Mountain Lake Marine Volunteer Fire Rescue reports:
* We have had two drownings at the lake this year.
* Two 14 year old children were very seriously injured while operating jet skis in Hatcher Creek. The skis collided with each other at speed resulting in the injuries.

North Korea has upped its level of threats against the United States. As of this writing, senior North Korean officials have threatened to simultaneously launch four ballistic missiles toward Guam sometime in the second half of this month. The missiles are to pass over Japan and land in the ocean near Guam.

When liberals first pointed out that American racists were now known as “the alt right,” and calling themselves “white nationalists,” conservatives said, huh, what? We’ve never even heard of that, they claimed.
Well, after last week’s tragic events in Charlottesville, they know about it now, don’t they? Or will they continue to bury their heads in the sand, and act as though Donald Trump wasn’t largely elected by racists, the “angry whites” we’ve heard so much about.

Four family stories of endurance begin in the Ohio wilderness of 1798. A bone-chilling wind whipped through the forest, the howling harbinger of a driving snowstorm. John Hosbrook had run into a blizzard on his homeward hike from the fort where he had replenished his family’s salt supply. That family and a warm cabin awaited him—if only he could get there.

Toilets at Liberty High School’s (LHS) new baseball field were a major part of a presentation on the Liberty Middle School construction project.
The project includes building a competition gym for the high school and the new gym is displacing the high school’s baseball field. A new high school baseball field is being built on a portion of the land purchased for the middle school.

As the new school year begins, I’d like to make our community aware of a wonderfully meaningful experience that has been in our area for several years: The Big Brothers Big Sisters Site-Based Mentor Program.
It is designed to pair a caring adult with a child in need of extra support. They meet once weekly at school for about an hour during the child’s lunch/recess time.

Matt Uselton, Liberty’s new head golf coach, stepped into an unfamiliar role... or rather, sport, in June 2017. The English teacher has been coaching since the early 2000s, but is tackling the challenge of coaching his third different sport.

Uselton’s athletic coaching career began at William Byrd in 2005 with boys varsity tennis. He also assisted with Byrd’s JV girls soccer team for a season. He then moved into Bedford County where he assisted Staunton River’s boys soccer team with former Liberty teacher, Kris McCoy.